PLAYING it for laughs is second nature to Anna Faris – but the Scary Movie actress is shaping up to be a serious success, as Simon Button reports

She played ditzy teenager Cindy in the Scary Movie series, ditzy blonde Shelley in The House Bunny and the ditzy birth mother of Monica and Chandler’s twins in Friends. See a theme developing here? Well, maybe, but 37-year-old Anna Faris doesn’t care about being typecast, as long as those Hollywood producers keep calling.

“Maybe I get these parts because nobody else will do them,” she laughs. “I’ve done a lot of very raunchy comedies and I don’t find any of that stuff scary. My parents have spent my whole career feeling offended.”

Now the Baltimore-born actress is tackling parenthood herself, in the US hit TV comedy Mom. She plays Christy Plunkett, a single mother who is raising a pregnant daughter while trying to hold down a waitressing job and attend regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And she is – you guessed – a bit ditzy.

But while the set-up may not sound like a barrel of laughs, with an award-winning writing team behind it and the brilliant Allison Janney (CJ Cregg from The West Wing) as Faris’s slutty mother, Mom is slick, cleverly observed and packed with razor-sharp one-liners.

In other words, it’s another of those US family sitcom classics – and when you say that to Anna she seems genuinely thrilled.

“Thank you soooo much!” she beams, adding that she’s delighted to be playing “someone who has had a really rough journey”. Unlike Faris herself, who’s had a great career and never had to work in a strip club to pay the bills – right?

“Hey, don’t underestimate me!” she grins. “Christy and I definitely share a love of a good time and I can be a pretty spontaneous gal. The big difference is that I grew up in a very stable family environment.”Born Anna Kay Faris, she began acting classes as an infant, encouraged by her mother.

“I loved it so much and I’d get so excited I couldn’t sleep the night before,” she recalls.

She went on to do plays and commercials, studied English at college and considered a career in advertising. “Then when I graduated, I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll give Los Angeles a year – I’ll work as a waitress and I’ll give it a shot, just to say I’ve done it.’ But some good people decided to represent me and I got Scary Movie.”

Thanks to that comedy-horror franchise – she did four of them – Anna never needed that waitressing job. She also stumbled on talents she never knew she had. “I hadn’t done comedy before and I don’t think anybody in my life had ever thought I could do it. I was this very serious person and I demanded to be taken seriously. I think it’s because I was so short that I needed to be heard.”

Her 5ft-4in frame has popped up in a few dramas (Lost In Translation, Brokeback Mountain) but these days comedy is Anna’s bread and butter. “I’m so grateful because it’s made me a happier person,” she says, adding that she used to think about pushing for more dramatic roles, “but then I thought that as an actress gets older, there’s more work in comedy”.

With her husband Chris [GETTY]

Looking fit and trim when we meet – and a lot younger than 37 – Anna wears black trousers and a vest that shows off some surprising muscles. “That’s because I have a huge toddler, so my arms have never been stronger,” reveals the proud mother of Jack, who was two in August.

Married to fellow actor Chris Pratt, who she met in 2007 while making the comedy Take Me Home Tonight, Anna couldn’t be happier with her lot. “Chris is a really funny guy and we laugh all the time,” she says. Which is as you’d expect, given that Chris plays hilarious, loveable slob Andy in the sitcom Parks and Recreation.

“Us being together is funny because we both grew up in the same area,” says Anna. “We didn’t know each other because we went to rival high schools but we have both grown up in our careers playing really dumb people.”

As well as his role in Parks and Recreation, Chris is the fast-rising star of superhero movie Guardians of the Galaxy. “I’m so proud of him because his career is just going crazy,” says Anna. And what about the incredible physique he honed for his role as Peter Quill in Guardians? “I have mixed feelings about that,” she sighs.

“It’s super-sexy but it doesn’t go with the lazy lifestyle that we both love: barbecue, beer, staying home, having friends over.”

Anna’s steady job on Mom and Chris’s rise to big-screen stardom means the couple can now afford to live the Hollywood dream – but they haven’t lost touch with their roots, as Anna is quick to point out. “Neither of us grew up with a lot of luxuries, so we don’t mind doing chores. I just have to give him a list – is that the key to men? He’ll happily clean the bathroom if I tell him to, but otherwise it would just never occur to him.”

Chris is currently away filming the fourth Jurassic Park film, while Anna is in the UK promoting Mom. This is the longest she’s been away from her son – but in a refreshing change from the celebrity script, she refuses to beat herself up about it. “I thought I’d miss him more. Well, when I think about it I really miss him, but otherwise I’m like, ‘Ooh, what’s on the movie channel?’”

Don’t get her wrong, though.

“I love being a mom,” she adds. “Jack is such a sweet, happy baby, and parenthood is all the things everyone says – you’ll never love anything more, you’ll never sleep again, you’ll stare at him all day.”

Jack has yet to discover what his parents do for a living, although Anna did recently sit him in front of the animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, in which she voiced weathergirl Sam Sparks. “He looked at it when he heard my voice,” she says, “but he’s not really into cartoons. I hope that when he’s a teenager, he doesn’t get mad about all this.”

Why would he? “Well, I imagine he’ll be mad at us for general reasons because they all get mad at that age, but I hope he isn’t too mad about what we do for a job and the fact we have to be away sometimes. If he does, I’ll just give him a signed head shot and say,

‘This will do until I get back!’”Meanwhile, Anna is having the time of her life, relaxing into the role of an on-screen mother. “In other projects, I’ve put pressure on myself to be really fit, especially if I have a scene where I’m in my bra or something. But with Mom, I don’t think it’s important and it wouldn’t be appropriate for Christy to be super-glamorous. And that’s just so liberating.”

The first series of Mom is available on Blu-ray and DVD from tomorrow.